It looks like AMD have launched a card, but neglected to tell anyone about it. The new Radeon R7 250XE may not be the most exciting card in AMDs range, actually it’s pretty much destined to be one of the least exciting, but it’s still important none the less. The new card appears to have been launched to counter the Nvidia GeForce GT 730/740 range.
The entry-level card features a low-profile, single slot design, so it may be a tempting option for compact HTPC and office style system, or just those who need a to upgrade from an on-board GPU solution. The card is said to be based around a 28nm Cape Verde refresh, features 640 stream processors, a 128 bit wide GDDR5 memory interface and is equipped with 1GB of memory. Core clock is 860 MHz and 4.5GHz for memory. The card is priced around $60-70 and we’re uncertain if it’ll be launching to a wider market, since AMD haven’t even told anyone about the original launch.
Thank you TechPowerUp for providing us with this information.
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A few years ago this would’ve been your $700 top of the line card… apart from the skinny memory bus
Yep and now $200 + seems to be premium card price. Which is great. Still would be nice to have better low range cards. I haven’t seen the benchmarks on the card listed or the gt 730/740 but I’d hope that it’d be comparable to the GTX 260 or higher. Too many cards in the 50-90 dollar range are just complete garbage.
$200 cards are more mid range reference types of cards, big name, swanky cooler overclocked cards tend to cost substantially more, at least here in South Africa that holds true.
I never tested any really low budget cards from either nVidia or AMD during my tenure as a tester/reviewer so I really can’t comment on them but it’s my belief they are better than an IGP, if barely, but there is certainly a market for them.
I disagree but that doesn’t mean you are wrong. I feel the video card industry manipulates the value of the cards to make more money as most corporations do. What that means to me is that even cards that can run new games on ultra @ 1080p are considered by the manufacture as mid range but why? Because some cards can do it at 1440p or dual monitor? Which I agree is high end to the fullest at the moment. I don’t think it lowers the quality of cards unable to do so on ultra because the 1440p ones are SOOO few and far at the moment. But consider a company like passmark who has different standards of ranking low, mid and high; I feel that is far more balanced.
So sure higher end cards like 780 deserve to be considered high end, I just refuse to see the gtx 760 as midrange. That card is a beast.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
To me is a more adequate gauge of card range. Keep it mind it shows all cards it has thought to be high range in the link I listed.
Times have changed during the past few years. Back in ~2004 till ~2009 both nVidia and ATI had 1 card each for low range, mid range and high range and that was it, 1280×960 was considered a high resolution and now they have multiple cards to cover all ranges and high range has really got high with multi-monitors needing multi-cards with resolutions in numbers I can barely understand 🙂
Yes graphics card makers do manipulate prices to suit themselves but that’s how business works
I remember testing a GF 6800GTX and a Radeon 850XT PE both equipped with 256MB RAM and both were around the 500 buck mark and thinking to myself “who needs such powerful cards and who will spend so much money just to play video games?” Today they’d struggle to run any new game above 20fps at 1366×768 in DX9 (that’s my guess anyway) but look on the bright side, $500 today will net you pretty high end card so prices haven’t really changed, in fact we’re better off now than we were back then.
I agree that a GTX760 is a very capable card at normal, sane resolutions that the vast majority of us use, myself included, it’s no slouch neither is it a beast and no way can it be considered high end at a ‘measly’ $200 and 3 years from now it’ll totally suck but then so will all of today’s high end and extreme high end cards. ($3000 Titan Z’s anyone?)
That’s progression for you.
Your right.
Fuck man! I want a Titan Z! Why does America have to be so damn morally corrupt financially. Making the same avg wage as we did in the 70’s and QE1-4 are devaluing that little bit we do make.
Not to mention stock fraud and bailouts. smh!
Forget it. If you’re a gamer you’re better off something else, the Titan Z is not a true gaming card, it’s primarily a compute card contrary to what others or even nVidia might tell you, although it can play games you’re not missing out on anything.
Noted. I’m currently rocking a gt 430 and the grass is greener on the other side.